Veronica Rowe - A life in Irish Craft

Veronica Rowe - A Life in Irish Craft © Making.ie

by Roger Bennett, Woodturner I visited Veronica Rowe at her home in the foothills of the Dublin mountains one morning in February, shortly before Covid 19 shut the country down. The weather had been appalling for weeks, but that morning we sat in bright sunshine in the conservatory for coffee and – no surprise this – biscuits from the country market.

“Now, what would you like to ask me?”

Where to start? Veronica was about to turn ninety, and her husband David had just reached a hundred years. There is no obvious correlation between their chronological and biological ages: they both seem in every way to be a generation younger. Veronica has made an enormous contribution to the crafts sector over the years: in her own professional career; in a succession of voluntary roles; as custodian of the lace collection of her remarkable grandmother, Florence Vere O’Brien; and through her authoritative writing on Limerick lace and its history.

Veronica told me that she was named after a close friend of her mother’s, Veronica Wynne, who ran a small hand weaving business in Avoca1 with her sisters Winifred and Emily. Her first employment was with the Wynnes, in 1948, staying with them in Tigroney House next door to the mill. It was an oldfashioned enterprise: she describes the three sisters as looking “like characters straight out of Jane Austen”. The mill was water powered, wool was carded and spun, and fabrics were dyed with natural dyes.

“I remember two men going out with a horse and cart collecting gorse flowers to make yellow dyes. The biggest problem was that if a customer liked a particular colour, it was almost impossible to make the same colour again. So economically, it was difficult.”

She says that Emily in particular had “an amazing sense of colour, and the fabrics they made really were wonderful. People bought them because they were so unusual, so one-off.”

After about a year, Veronica realised that she needed formal education and a qualification in the field.

She studied textile design in Galashiels in Scotland, in a college which is now part of Heriot Watt University. Weaving was a huge industry in Scotland in the 1950s, particularly in the Borders region – Hawick, Peebles, Selkirk – and she gained useful experience working in mills there. Back in Ireland, she worked for a number of textile companies –

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“It was quite easy to get a job then, as not many people had a design qualification.”

Veronica worked in Galway for the O’Flynn family for four years, near the Salmon Weir Bridge. She got a scholarship from the Arts Council which allowed her to further her studies in Florence and Paris, for nearly a year. She then worked for Blarney Woollen Mills, and in Midleton, Co Cork.

Veronica was a textile designer with Gaeltarra Éireann for four years in the late 1950s, a job she clearly loved. Gaeltarra Éireann, the predecessor of Údarás na Gaeltachta, was a state body set up to develop industries in Gaeltacht regions.

“That was a very big organisation. We had about 2,000 employees: Crolly Dolls in Donegal; knitwear in Mayo; and a lot of weaving. And it’s gone now, as if it had never existed! Its role was to provide work for Irish-speaking people living in remote places. Father McDyer was a driving force. As well as the mills, I remember the weavers working at home in Donegal, in places like Glencolumcille and Killybegs, using very basic four-shaft looms. We made yards and yards of plain weave tweed; at the time transport companies – bus, train – were using this tweed to cover seats. And Aer Lingus. There’s a plane in the aviation museum in Foynes whose seats are covered with Gaeltarra tweed.”

top: l: 2 girls with Crolly Doll ©RTÉ Archive r: John McGinley Hand Weaving in the 1970s ©Orwell & Browne bottom: l: Father McDyer's Folk Village at Glencolumcille r: Father McDyer (1910-1987)

She evokes a world which has largely disappeared, recalling how some weavers came down the mountain every week to meet the Gaeltarra Éireann van, with their tweed draped across the front of their donkeys. * * *

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In 1960, when Veronica got married, she had to give up her job because of the public service marriage bar for women. She had her own weaving studio, where she wove floor rugs mainly. She did some commission work, most notably for the architect Liam McCormick in his celebrated Donegal churches.

Veronica is justifiably very proud of the pieces she made for McCormick. For St Aengus’s Church in Burt2, she wove the ambo hanging, which depicts the four Evangelists in colours that tie in with those of Helen Moloney’s stained glass windows. And for St Michael’s Church in Creeslough, Veronica wove the altar tapestry which was designed by Helen Moloney.

The ambo hanging, woven by Veronica Rowe, in St Aengus’s Church in Burt - photo ©Steve Cadman

Her involvement in the crafts world continued in many other ways as well. Veronica was secretary for seven years of the Irish Society for Design and Craftwork, which ran an important annual exhibition until the mid 1980s. She was involved in setting up the Weavers Group, which amalgamated with the Irish Guild of Weavers, Spinners, and Dyers in 1981 3. For several years she was on the judging panel of the Golden Fleece Awards4 which had been established as a charitable bequest by Lillias Mitchell; she retired from that eventually “because a lot of the entries were being submitted on video and I found it difficult to judge them – I’m more hands on!”

Veronica remembers meetings in the Country Shop5 in St Stephen’s Green, which had been set up by the legendary Muriel Gahan, and was the centre of myriad crafts activities over the decades until it closed in 1978. Veronica fondly recalls the smell of turf smoke and cheese (sent up by her Aunt Flora from County Clare), “and David upstairs getting tea and buns from Muriel Gahan for doing the accounts!”

l: Lillias Mitchell photo: ©Golden Fleece Awards r: Muriel Gahan photo: ©Deeds not Words, Town House1997

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Muriel Gahan was a friend of Veronica’s grandmother, and it was Muriel who encouraged her to join the RDS in 1989. Veronica’s term as Chair of the RDS Crafts Sub-Committee was certainly “hands on”. The high point every year was the National Crafts Competition. Launched in 1968 “to encourage the craftsman, and bring before the public a selection of the best work that is being made in Ireland … ” 6, it had developed into a very important annual event – “one of the finest of its kind in Europe” 7. Veronica was passionately committed to the competition, and she was very active in every element of its organisation, from the “rigorous and impartial selection of the judges” to the laying out of the exhibition and the announcement of the prize-winners at the awards ceremony. Unexpected entries delighted her: “I always enjoyed the day when the craft entries were delivered. I remember somebody (Cathy Mac Aleavey)8 arriving in with a boat for the furniture category. Quite large, a water wag. Wheeled in, beautifully made. And somebody (Laura O’Hagan) 9 brought in a mosaic wall on wheels! It was a brilliant concept: you could put it in your garden, or use it inside.”

Veronica’s big initiative was to instigate a travelling exhibition of the winning entries to celebrate the Millennium in 2000, taking it to two or three venues around the country after its display in the RDS during the Horse Show. This was a great success; Veronica pays tribute to the encouragement she received from the then RDS president Liam Connellan when she broached the idea. It entailed a lot of work, but it was very exciting and it did much to stimulate interest in crafts around the country: “We took the exhibition to forty different venues in subsequent years. Wherever we brought the exhibition, there would have been two or three local craftspeople represented in that area, and they got terrific exposure.”

She recalls the very first venue, the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Cultra – “… the exhibition space was full of all sorts of vehicles, which first had to be moved to one side!”

Islander creosoting a currach on Inis Oírr ©Harold Strong

A favourite memory is of going to the Aran Islands in 2005, to Áras Éanna Arts Centre on Inis Oírr – this exhibition was organised by committee member Bernardine Hurley: “As we were setting up the exhibition, they were creosoting a currach outside the window – there was a big currach race coming up between Inis Oírr and Inis Meáin.”

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The end of an era; advertisement for the last RDS Craft Awards Competition & Exhibition in 2017 ©RDS facebook page

Veronica laments the RDS’s decision to end the competition and exhibition in 2018: “Dropping the big exhibition was a serious mistake in my opinion. … There is no other competition where anybody can enter, and the piece is judged solely on its merits. Hobbyists and professionals were judged as equals.”

For her, this egalitarian aspect of the exhibition was extremely important, as was the range of disciplines. Along with contemporary gallery pieces, traditional crafts which were in danger of dying out were given the life blood of exposure.

“I remember a man from Roscommon coming on the train, with a double hen coop made out of plaited straw. Another man came by boat and train from the Aran Islands with a big willow turf basket. These people were dedicated to their craft, and getting into the RDS exhibition was a big deal for them.

Where else could you show a hen coop?! … Now, there is no equivalent. And there is really nothing like it either for the person making a one-off piece.”

Veronica has donated a series of her photo albums to the RDS Library, which contain an informal record of the Crafts Competition from 1999 to 2012: shots of various winning pieces and other selected exhibits, both in the RDS and on the road, as well as behind-the-scenes ones of judges deliberating and conferring, of meetings and presentations. It is a fascinating resource, available for perusal on request from the society’s archivist.

In 2011, Veronica was honoured by the RDS for her services as a Long Serving Voluntary Officer. *

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In June 2019 Veronica presented a priceless collection of Limerick lace on long-term loan to Limerick Museum. This collection had come down to Veronica from her maternal grandmother Florence Vere O’Brien (1854-1936), an inspirational woman who played a huge part in the revival of Limerick lacemaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mrs Florence Vere O’Brien with her daughters Jane and Flora, 1905 (Rowe Collection)

Florence’s father William Arnold10 had been Director of Education in the Punjab. Orphaned as a child, Florence was sent back to England to be adopted by her Aunt Jane and her husband, the Liberal politician W E Forster. He was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1880 to 1882 – they lived for those years in what is now the American ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park. In 1883 Florence married Robert Vere O’Brien, a barrister and Clerk of the Peace at Ennis Courthouse, whom she had first met at a charity ball in Limerick; Robert had grown up in Dromoland Castle.

On arriving in Limerick in 1883 after their honeymoon, Florence noticed a group of women on the steps of the railway station selling lace, “on very coarse material, but with beautiful workmanship”. She was immediately captivated. Lacemaking had been an important industry in Limerick from the 1830s, but was badly hit by the development of machine-made lace and was in serious decline in the 1880s.

Florence immediately decided to see what she could do to help revive the industry.

“My grandmother set up a lace school in Limerick, at first in Bank Place and later in George’s Street (now called O’Connell Street), in which girls were trained in design as well as workmanship. … The school was extraordinarily successful.”

She supplied lacemakers with designs and good quality materials to work on in their homes, selling the finished pieces as ‘Limerick Lace’. Florence was a gifted artist, and many of the designs were her own, often based on Clare flower patterns, “flowers she could see in the garden”; the one thing she insisted must be avoided at all costs was “a flat curve”. She also used students from Cork School of Art and from Dublin, and commissioned designs from carefully selected artists such as the eminent botanical illustrator and lace designer Alice Jacob. Crucially, she also was a good businesswoman and organiser; she demanded the highest standards of materials and workmanship – “Nothing passed that wasn’t absolutely the best!” The lace sold well both in Ireland and abroad, as Veronica recounts: “They entered every exhibition and competition, including the RDS, where they won First Prize again and again; they went as far as Chicago and St Louis. I have a lot of certificates and medals which were won in these places. … They were shipping masses of lace out to America.”

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Florence got tremendous support from her husband, who subsidised the school, and from members of a wide network of liberal-minded and enlightened landed families in Limerick and Clare, many of them related to Robert. She also set up Clare Embroidery, a small but successful cottage business which ran until 1938. She was very concerned about the welfare of her workers, as described by Dr Matthew Potter in his history of Limerick lacemaking, Amazing Lace : “Unlike some of the lace factory owners earlier in the nineteenth century, Florence Vere O’Brien was known to be a very kind and caring employer, an ethos which she had inherited from her Quaker background. She inspired fervent loyalty in her staff, one of whom, Eileen O’Donohue, described her ‘as a friend, as well as my employer’. On the occasion of Florence’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1908, the pupils of the lace school and the home workers each gave her a present of lace they had made themselves, with accompanying testimonials signed by all the staff.” 11 The lace school closed in 1922, hit by the war and by Robert’s death in 1913. The stock was brought to Florence’s home, Ballyalla House, near Ennis. When Florence died in 1936, her daughter Flora – Veronica’s aunt – inherited Ballyalla. Then after Flora’s death in 1970, Veronica discovered the lace pieces, together with the names of their makers and designers, stored in a tin box in an outhouse: “It had all been kept in very good condition. Fortunately it was a tin box and not a cardboard box!”

Lace pieces, dating back to the time of Florence Vere O’Brien on display at the Hunt Museum in Limerick.

As custodian of the collection, Veronica has written about Limerick lacemaking 12, given many talks and lectures, and lent pieces to various exhibitions. A lot of the designs are now in the National Museum.

When her own daughter got married, Veronica had part of a piece of lace worked into the wedding dress, designed by Florence in 1885, made and initialled by a Mary Kenna. Veronica was always very keen that the collection “should go back to Limerick, because that’s where it belongs”. She was delighted when eventually this did happen last year: the collection is on long-term loan to Limerick Museum, and part of it is on display in the Hunt Museum. In his speech at the handing-over event, Dr Matthew Potter, Curator of Limerick Museum, remarked: “It is a wonderful privilege to accept this marvellous collection, generously donated by Veronica Rowe in honour of her grandmother Florence Vere O’Brien, whose contribution to the lace industry is immeasurable”13.

The Deputy Mayor of Limerick City and County Council described the collection as “one of the most significant donations to Limerick Museum for many years” 14.

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Deputy Mayor of Limerick City and County Gerald Mitchell and Dr Matthew Potter admiring part of the collection with Veronica Rowe - photo ©Keith Wiseman

Veronica co-authored Limerick Lace: A Social History and a Maker’s Manual 15 with lace expert and historian Nellie Ó Cléirigh.

The book was launched by TD Jim Kemmy in 1995. The Limerick Leader report of the launch succinctly states that “Mrs Vere O’Brien made Limerick lace fashionable among the international pre-Raphaelite art set.”16 Linda May Ballard reviewed the book in Irish Arts Review: “Divided into three parts, this neat study admirably achieves its purpose of providing both well researched historical background information about Limerick lace and technical instructions for lacemakers. …

At the launch in 1995 of the book Limerick Lace: A Social History and a Maker's Manual were l-r: Nellie ÓCléirigh, Deputy Jim Kemmy and Veronica Rowe

In the book's first two sections the history of the commercial production of Limerick lace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is traced from two distinct but closely complementary angles.

Nellie Ó Cléirigh's careful detective work provides a detailed picture of the range and scope of Limerick lacemaking from its inception in the 1820s, highlighting many important issues including the economic importance of lace production – sales through co-operatives rose from £4,230 in 1895 to £23,149 in 1900. Veronica Rowe's equally meticulous research focuses on the energetic activities of her grandmother, the beautiful Florence Vere O'Brien, a key figure in the revival of Limerick lace in the late Victorian period. …

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This study is testimony to the fact that a century after Florence Vere O'Brien and her colleagues worked so hard to ensure the success of Limerick lacemaking, its popularity endures. It illuminates the importance of this lovely form of needlework and highlights its place as a decorative art.” 17 *

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Throughout her life Florence sketched and made watercolours of the places she visited, in Britain, Europe and Ireland. Veronica inherited the sketches from her Aunt Flora; they lay untouched for years in a storage box on a high shelf. When she and David eventually opened the box, they were so delighted with the quality of what they discovered that they decided to bring out a book of the Irish sketches and watercolours: “Her sketch-books contained over a thousand images, which our son-in-law, Richard Cluff, very kindly photographed, and mounted on a disc. It is that resource which we have used to create this book – that, and the journals of Florence, which she had maintained throughout her life, and which were very well written. Herein we have matched the sketches with related passages from the journals.” 18 In 2017, The Irish Sketches of Florence Vere O’Brien19 was published. David edited the book, and Veronica wrote the introduction. Quite apart from the family connection, it is a project which appealed to David. He is a former president of An Taisce, and a very accomplished artist – his line drawings and cartoons are superb – and he has edited and illustrated a number of books 20 on architectural and environmental subjects.

Florence’s watercolour painting of her home, Ballyalla House, near Ennis, Co Clare

The Irish Sketches is a charming book, filled with a series of written and visual snapshots of Florence’s life in Ireland: the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in the Phoenix Park, her honeymoon in Donegal, interiors and exteriors of the houses she lived in and some she visited, ruined castles, scenic views. The watercolour paintings are exquisite, and in the extracts from the journals Florence reveals herself as a woman of great intelligence and sensitivity whose life seemed completely fulfilled, as in this description of a summer evening in Ballyalla: “I am sitting in the drawing room, with Quintus (her dog) lying at my feet. Though 9 o’clock has struck, the sunshine is still irradiating the grassy hill beyond the lake, and one side of Drumcliffe tower. The

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lawns have just been mown, and the flower beds are beginning to make a faint show of colour. Jenny and Flora are out in the garden, working, I expect, or else ministering in some way to the many needs of the poultry, or perhaps they are at their drawing in the nursery.” 21

Veronica and David Rowe with RDS President Bernie Brennan when ‘Irish Sketches of Florence Vere O’Brien’ was presented at the RDS during the 2018 Dublin Book Festival

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Veronica herself was born in Ballyalla, six years before Florence’s death. Her mother Jane was the older daughter of Florence and Robert; Veronica’s Aunt Flora22, who inherited Ballyalla, was the younger daughter.

Veronica grew up in Walterstown House, near Crusheen in County Clare; her father Godfrey Hardy was a farmer. Her mother Jane was a good artist, and contributed designs to the lace workers – Veronica says that she “was not as talented a designer as Florence, but was still very good!” Like Florence, Jane inherited the family social activist gene: Veronica is very proud that in 1912 her mother set up the second Irish Countrywomen’s Association branch in the country 23.

Godfrey died when Veronica was only twelve; Veronica remembers how difficult it was for her mother to keep the farm going, particularly during the years of the ‘Emergency’. Eventually the farm was purchased by the Land Commission, who demolished the house, and Veronica moved to Dublin with her mother. But Veronica did not lose her connection to her home place: they were able to keep back six acres, and she and David and their family spend a lot of time there. *

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l-r: Professor Eugene Wall, The Very Rev'd Niall J Sloane, Dean of Saint Mary's Cathedral, Veronica Rowe Mayor Sheahan and and Helen O Donnell

When I visited Veronica and David back in February, they had just returned from a trip to Limerick. They had travelled there for a very special occasion: at a service in St Mary’s Cathedral on 16 February Veronica was presented with the 2020 Community Award “for her contribution to Limerick lace”. This annual award was launched by St Mary’s Cathedral in 2018 “to bring attention to the unsung heroes of Limerick”.24 We should sing out Veronica Rowe’s name in celebration, to thank her for all that she has given, and continues to give, to the Irish crafts world throughout her long and full life.

Roger Bennett, April 2020

Watch a recording of Veronica Rowe speaking at the handing-over event at the Hunt Museum can be seen at: https://youtu.be/bNmc6Vwq78Y ©LimerickLace.ie About the author: Roger Bennett specialises in making very distinctive one-off bowls and vessels, usually thin-walled, inlaid with silver, and coloured with wood dyes. He has a degree in English and French from Trinity College, Dublin. He is a self-taught woodturner working from his studio in Co. Dublin. He was a recipient of the RDS Established Maker Award in 2016. Visit his website here. *

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Footnotes: 1. This later became the hugely successful Avoca Handweavers, now Avoca. Click here to read more.

2. St Aengus’s church was awarded the RIAI Triennial Gold Medal in 1971, and was voted ‘building of the century’ in a poll of Irish architects.

3. History of Irish Guild of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers. Click here to read more.

4. Golden Fleece Award. Click here to read more.

5. For a full description of the Country Shop and its history, see Chapter 8 of Geraldine Mitchell’s superb biography of Muriel Gahan, Deeds Not Words, (Town House, 1997).

6. Muriel Gahan, ‘The Development of Crafts’, in The Royal Dublin Society 1731-1981, edited by James Meenan and Desmond Clarke, Gill & Macmillan 1981, p. 261 7. Una Lehane, The Irish Times, 5 June 1985, p.10: “At the conclusion of the judging of last year’s competition, the chairman of the panel of adjudicators, Mr. John Vedel-Rieper, from the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, stated that in his estimation the RDS Crafts Competition had now become one of the finest of its kind in Europe.”

8. Click here to read Joe Hogan’s account of Cathy Mac Aleavey 's boat-building project on this website.

9. Click here to see Laura O’Hagan's screen walls.

10. William Arnold (1828-1859) was the son of Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby School, and brother of the poet Matthew Arnold.

11. Dr Matthew Potter, Amazing Lace, A History of the Limerick Lace Industry, Limerick City and County Council, 2014, p. 92 12. For example, this meticulously researched essay on two designers who “made a significant contribution to the success of lace making in Ireland” in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century: Veronica Rowe, ‘Two forgotten talents of Limerick lace: Michael Hayes and Eileen O’Donohue’, Irish Arts Review, vol.15 (1999), p. 61-70 13. Limerick City & County Council website click here 14. Ibid 15. The late Nellie Ó Cléirigh and Veronica Rowe, Limerick Lace: A Social History and a Maker’s Manual, Colin Smythe, 1995 16. Dymphna Bracken, ‘New book on story of city lacemaking’, Limerick Leader, (?) July 1995, p. 5 17. Irish Arts Review, Vol. 13 (1997) p. 203 18. Preface to The Irish Sketches of Florence Vere O’Brien

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19. The Irish Sketches of Florence Vere O’Brien, edited by David Rowe, with the introduction by Veronica Rowe, Ballinakella Press, 2017

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20. Books which David has written, edited and/or illustrated: High skies, low lands: an anthology of the Wexford slobs and harbour, edited by David Rowe and Christopher J. Wilson, Duffry Press, 1996 David Rowe and Eithne Scallan, Historical genealogical notes on some houses of Wexford, Ballinakella Press, 2004 Eithne Scallan, You can’t be serious, illustrated by David Rowe, Chaos Press, 2005 Sketches in South Dublin, drawn by David Rowe, South County Dublin Association of An Taisce, 2010 Alderman Thomas Kelly TD, The Streets of Dublin 1910-1911, edited by Sheila Carden, illustrated by David Rowe, Dublin Civic Trust, 2013 21. The Irish Sketches of Florence Vere O’Brien, p. 54 22. Flora was a very talented artist and poet. A book containing her poems and a selection of her woodcuts and linocuts, compiled by David, was published in 2000, thirty years after her death: Intimations, The Works of the Clare poet and artist Florence (Flora) Vere O’Brien, Ballinakella Press, 2000 23. The first was in Bree, Co Wexford, in 1910.

24. ilovelimerick.ie click here Unattributed quotes are from a conversation with Veronica which I recorded in her home in February 2020; also from a lengthy interview with her which was recorded in 2011 by Maurice O’Keeffe in the Irish Life and Lore ‘Great Houses of Ireland’ series (available to purchase here) MAKING.ie would like to acknowledge the support of Design & Crafts Council Ireland, especially Mary Whelan, through their Network Support Scheme Video links Short interview with Father James McDyer click: here

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